We aren’t sure that [John Heisz’s] build is really what we think of as a drill press, but it is a very portable way to convert a regular drill into something like a drill press. Your drill will probably be different, but you can follow along with his build in the video below.
On the face of it, it doesn’t seem like this would be very hard, but there are a few tricks. Finding the exact center of the drill axis on the back of the drill takes a bit of effort.
It’s not a stretch to say that most devices these days have settled on USB as their power source of choice. While we imagine you’ll still be running into the occasional wall wart and barrel jack for the foreseeable future, at least we’re getting closer to a unified charging and power delivery technology. But are all USB chargers and cables created equal?
The answer, of course, is no. But the anecdotal information we all have about dud USB gear is just that, which is why [Igor Brkić] wanted to take a more scientific approach. Inspired by the lighting bolt icon the Raspberry Pi will flash on screen when the voltage drops too low, he set out to make a proper examination of various USB chargers and cables to see which ones aren’t carrying their weight.
In the first half of his investigation, [Igor] tests four fairly typical USB chargers with his TENMA 72-13200 electronic load. Two of them were name brand, and the other just cheap clones. He was surprised to find that all of the power supplies not only met their rated specifications, but in most cases, over-performed by a fair amount. For example the Lenovo branded charger that was rated for only 1 A was still putting out a solid 5 V at 1.7 A. Of course there’s no telling what would happen if you ran them that high for hours or days at a time, but it does speak to their short-term burst capability at least.
He then moved onto the USB cables, were things started to fall apart. The three generic cables saw significant voltage drops even at currents as low as 0.1 A, though the name brand cable with 20 AWG power wires did fare a bit better. But by .5 A they were all significantly below 5 V, and at 1 A, forget about it. Pulling anything more than that through these cables is a non-starter, and in general, you’ll need to put at least 5.2 V in if you want to actually run a USB device on the other side.
Admittedly this might not be groundbreaking research, but we appreciate [Igor] taking a scientific approach and tabulating all the information. If you’re still getting low voltage warnings on the Pi after swapping out your cheapo cables, then maybe the problem is actually elsewhere.
Emojis are all well and good if you want to add a fun tiny picture to your textual communication to try and add some finer context or zing, but what if the appropriate tiny picture doesn’t accurately represent you or how you feel? Never fear, cowboys, the emoji set you’ve been dreaming of has now been created.
The set was initially created by the appropriately-named [pensivecowboy], by using scripts to place cowboy hats atop existing emojis from the twemoji set automatically. Over time, it was decided to instead just apply these hats to the 300 most-used emojis instead, with some manual fettling in cases where the script-generated result needed a little work.
The result is a complete set of Unicode-compatible cowboy and pensive_cowboy emojis, for when you’re feeling like a cowboy, or feeling like a sad cowboy. Scripts are included for those wishing to work more intimately with the emojis, and there’s even Discord channels to give instant access to the new emojis for those with Nitro subscriptions.
Is this important, groundbreaking work? Your opinion on that likely depends on how much of a cow or a boy you are. But down at the ranch, it’ll likely bring many a smile to a pensive cowboy’s face. A quick search did note the absence of a :snake_in_my_boot: emoji, however, which could be a safety issue down the line.
We’d love to see some open tools built for programmatically hacking emojis; if you’ve developed some, drop us a line. Alternatively, consider this emoji gun that shoots small foam emojis at other people to delight or annoy them.
The big kerfuffle in the open source world this week surrounds the biggest IRC server operator, Freenode. Wherever the dust settles, myriad important open source projects use Freenode’s IRC servers for their main channel of user feedback, and a number of vibrant communities call or called Freenode home. What you would call a 3D printer, and most of the software that drives it, for instance, was brainstormed up in Freenode’s #reprap. If you want help with a Linux distribution, you’ll be set straight within a few minutes in the relevant channel, because the people who wrote, packaged, or maintain it are probably on Freenode waiting to chat.
But suppose Freenode burns to the ground tomorrow, as some are suggesting. So what? My take is that is doesn’t matter. Freenode doesn’t own IRC, setting up an IRC server is essentially trivial, and what’s really important is the online community — they can just pick up and move somewhere else with very little hassle.
This is not to say that we don’t all benefit from the diligence that Freenode’s volunteer administrators and operators have donated to the cause over the years. IRC servers don’t run themselves, and Freenode’s admins fought and won an epic battle with spammers a couple years back. Keeping IRC running at scale is a different thing than setting up something for your friends, and so the Freenode folks definitely deserve our thanks.
But look, IRC is an old protocol and it’s a simple protocol. It’s so simple, in fact, that writing an IRC bot is just a few dozen lines in Python, using no external libraries. All you need to do is send plain text over a socket. You can do this — it makes a great networking hello world.
IRC is fun for hackers, but if you want a user-friendly GUI client, you ridiculously many to choose from. There are even no-install web clients if you just want to dip your toes in. Heck, you could install your own server in an hour or so.
So saying that the demise of Freenode is the end of IRC is a lot like saying that the end of Hotmail was the end of e-mail. In the grand scheme of things, almost nobody actually uses IRC — Freenode has 78,000 users while Slack has 10 million — and IRC users are very savvy, if not full-on geeky. These are the sort of people who can probably find the server field in a menu and change it from irc.freenode.net to irc.whatever.org.
In addition to our traditional #hackaday channel on irc.freenode.net, there’s also a channel set up on irc.libera.chat as well. There isn’t much action in either — IRC tends to be a slow conversation, so don’t freak out if someone responds to you an hour later — but if you want to swing by, we’re there. IRC will never die!
If you missed our announcement, this year’s Hackaday Prize is on! We’ve all had a rough year and a half, and it’s lead a lot of us to think seriously about our world. How would you want to change it going forward? Fifty entrants will rethink, refresh, and rebuild their way into $500, and the Grand Prize is $25,000. Get hacking!
Plenty of clocks around us are useful for telling us the precise hour, minute, and second of the day. However, few can give us an intuitive sense of how far away we are from the enveloping cloak of night. This 3D printed Earth clock built by [Simon Rob] promises to do just that.
The build consists of an Arduino Nano driving a stepper motor, which turns a 3D printed model of the Earth through 360 degrees each day. The Earth is rotated within a black shroud such that the current portion of the Earth seeing sunlight is the visible section on the clock, while the rest is hidden from view. There’s a three-stage planetary gear reduction which turns a date wheel connected to the black shroud so that the clock remains accurate throughout the year. The gear ratio isn’t perfect — [Simon] calculates its drift to be 20 hours over a year -but it’s close enough for the clock’s given purpose of being a cool thing.
The clock looks great, and a lot of that is down to [Simon]’s careful work painting the Earth to match the real thing based on Google’s satellite maps. Incidentally it’s not the first Earth clock we’ve seen, either. We might just have to get building one for our own coffee table at home. Video after the break.
Continue reading “3D Printed Earth Clock Is Cute Replica Of Our Delicate Planet”
[Rudi Schoenmackers] has devised a clever set of custom 3D-printed jigs that makes it easy to build your own wooden hex nuts and bolts. Well, easy if you have access to a woodworking shop with a router, bandsaw and belt sander.
You won’t be using these to mount your PCBs, however. They are pretty big — UNC 1½-6 threads (the closest metric thread would probably be M36-4). [Rudi] points out that these jigs can be readily adapted to generate different sizes and pitches of threads, even left-handed ones, but we suspect making a #4-40 or M3-0.5 is out of the question. There are commercial jigs for making threads, but as [Rudi] points out, those are quite expensive. The price of [Rudi]’s jigs is quite low, assuming you have a 3D printer.
We’re not sure how to best take advantage of these nuts and bolts in ordinary hacking projects, but [Rudi] enjoys giving them away as cool toys or making large clamps and vises out of them. Let us know if you have any applications where wooden threaded fasteners could come in handy. If wooden threads interest you, then check out this project we covered a few years ago on making simple taps.
Lithophanes are artistic creations which rely on the varying thickness of a material that is then backlit to reveal an image. While these were often made in porcelain in the past, these days we have the benefit of 3D printing on our side. The principle can be deftly applied to everything from flat planes to spheres, with [Tiffany Lo] demonstrating a great application of the latter with her 3D printed moon lamp.
The basic concept is to take a 2D image of the lunar surface, and then use it to generate a height mapped sphere for 3D printing. When lit from within, the sphere will appear as per the surface of the moon. The sphere geometry was generated with the Lithophane Sphere Maker online tool combined with NASA data of the moon intended for computer graphics purposes. The sphere was then printed on a typical FDM printer before being assembled upon a base with LEDs inside for backlighting.
The result is an attractive moon lamp that both recalls the heavy rock that follows us in a tidally-locked orbit, and yet can be switched off at night to make it easier to sleep. Unfortunately, it’s impractical to turn off the shine from the real moon, and we suspect nobody is working on the problem.
We’ve seen other moon lamps before; they’re a great starting point because the moon’s greyscale tones work well as a lithograph. More advanced techniques are likely necessary for those eager to create lamps of the gas giants; if you’ve done so, be sure to drop us a line.
